I leaned in close for just a second. “Why don’t you just slip it in your pocket, then?” I whispered.
Del cut his eyes toward the man behind the counter, and then turned back to me. His look said hush. “I told you last night was the last time,” he said, a low growl.
I just swayed that monkey a little more.
A woman in a green dress jingled through the door then and went up to the counter. “You were holding something for me,” she said, and the man put down his polish rag, and they started talking.
You could tell that Delwood was relieved not to have a witness anymore. “C’mon, Louise,” he said. “Be serious.”
But me? For better or worse, I just upped the ante.
“Suppose I said to you that this monkey” — I jerked my finger so that his little monkey body bounced a little — “this monkey represents love to me.”
“Love?” he said.
“The potential for love,” I clarified. “The possibility of it.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, suppose I told you that my daddy, the last time I saw him, me only six years old, he comes into my bedroom to tuck me in and he gives me a little sock-puppet monkey, bigger than this one, but looking pretty much the same” (because the truth is they all do) “and he says to me, ‘Hon, Daddy’s going away for a while, but while I’m gone, this little monkey is gonna take care of you, and any time you find yourself thinking of me or wondering about me, I want you to hug this monkey close to you, and I’ll be there with you. Wherever I am, I’ll be here with you.’ And he touched his heart.”
I wasn’t talking loud, but the man behind the counter and the customer had grown quiet, listening to me now even as they pretended not to. Del wasn’t sweating, not really, but with all the attention — two witnesses to our argument now — he looked like he was or was just about to break out into one.
“And my mom was behind him, leaned against the door watching us,” I said. “Anyone probably could have seen from her face that he wasn’t coming back and that it was her fault and she felt guilty, but I was too young to know that then. And I dragged that monkey around with me every day and slept with it every night and hugged it close. And finally my mom threw it away, which told me the truth. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me when I cried about it, because she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend and had her own heart broken, I guess. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting that.’ And I stopped crying. But still, whatever my mama told me and whether my daddy came back or not, I believed — I knew — that there had been love there, there in that moment, in that memory, you know?”
Del looked over at the wall, away from the shopkeeper and his customer, and stared at this sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco — an iron silhouette. The tilt of his head and the nervous look in his eyes reminded me of the first night we’d met, at the 7-Eleven, when he’d called me “ma’am” and I’d told him my age. Seemed like here was another conversation where he was playing catch-up, but this time he seemed fearful for different reasons.
“And maybe,” I said, helping him along, “just maybe if you bought this for me, I’d know you really loved me, for always and truly. Now,” I said, “would that get it through your thick skull?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an embarrassed look on the storekeeper’s face — embarrassed for Del and maybe a little embarrassed for me, too. His customer, the woman in green, cleared her throat, and the shopkeeper said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get that for you.”
Del shifted his lower jaw to the side — another indication, I’d learned, that his mind was working on something, weighing things. He really was sweating now, and still staring at that bucking-bronco sculpture like he felt some kinship with the cowboy on top, like staring at it might give him an answer somehow.
“What was your monkey’s name?” he asked me.
I gave out a long sigh, with an extra dose of irritation in it. He was missing the whole point, just like always. “I don’t know,” I told him. I sighed again. “Murphy,” I said.
His look changed then, just a little crease of the forehead, a little raise of the eyebrow. “Murphy the monkey?” he said. He wasn’t looking at the sculpture now, wasn’t looking afraid anymore but something else entirely. “Well, Louise,” he began. “I don’t really think that this monkey represents the love we share, and the truth is that thirty dollars seems like quite a bit for—”
But I didn’t hear the rest of it. I just turned and walked off, out the door, slamming it behind me the way I’d slammed the Nova’s door that morning and stomping off fast back toward the car.
I can’t say whether I wanted him to call for me to come back or rush out after me, something dramatic like that, but if I did, I was indeed fooling myself, just like Mama had warned. That wasn’t Delwood. When I got in the car, I saw him through the window, slowly coming back — those sad little footsteps behind me, scuff scuff scuff. No hurry at all, like he knew I’d be waiting.
We rode on in silence after that — a heavy silence, you know what I mean. More ghost towns where people used to have hopes and dreams and now there was nothing but a little bit of rubble and a long stretch of empty land. I wasn’t even angry now, just deflated, disappointed.
“Men will do that to you,” my mama told me another time. “After a while you feel like it’s not even worth trying.” I’d known what she meant, theoretically. Now I knew in a different way.
Soon the two-lane widened, and the strip malls started up and fast-food restaurants — civilization. I saw a Wendy’s and asked if it was okay to stop.
“I’ll pick from the dollar menu,” I said, sarcastic-like.
Del didn’t say anything, just pulled through the drive-thru and ordered what I wanted. He didn’t get anything for himself. I think it was just out of spite.
Toward evening, we stopped at a motel in Kingman, Arizona, one of those cheap ones that have been there since Route 66 was an interesting road and not just a tourist novelty — the ones that now looked like they’d be rented for the hour by people who didn’t much care what the accommodations were like.
Del checked us in, pulled the Nova around to the stairwell closest to our room.
“Get your kicks,” I said.
“Kicks?” he said, baffled.
“Route 66,” I said, pointing to a sign. “Guess we couldn’t afford the Holiday Inn either, huh?”
He stared straight ahead, drummed his fingers light against the steering wheel. He curled up his bottom lip a little and chewed on his beard.
“You know those court shows you watch on TV?” Del said finally. “And how you tell me some of those people are so stupid? You listen to their stories and you laugh and you tell me, ‘That’s where they went wrong,’ or ‘They should’ve known better than that.’ ”
“Do you mean,” I said, “something like a man who robs a convenience store and then calls up the clerk he’s held at gunpoint and asks her out for a date?” I felt bad about it as soon as I said it. Part of why I fell in love with him and now I was complaining about it.
“There were extenuating circumstances in that instance,” he said, and this warning sound had crept into his tone, one that I hadn’t heard before. “I’m just saying that we need to be fairly circumspect now about whatever we do. Any misstep might put us in front of a real judge, and it won’t be a laughing matter, I can assure you.” He turned to face me. “Louise,” he said, again that way he does. “I love you, Louise, but sometimes... Well, little girl, sometimes you just don’t seem to be thinking ahead.”